Churches

Saying that prohibitive land prices are squeezing out small churches, members of a new Orange County religious coalition this week announced plans to seek zoning requirements for churches and nonprofit groups that would put them on a par with schools, parks and open space.

Halloween is the witches' night out, a feast of death when spirits roam the Earth. Even as some real witches prepare to reconcile themselves with the dead in secret rituals on Oct. 31, there is a growing concern among some Christian groups that the road to satanic cults may be paved with cultural celebrations that take lightly witchcraft practices that are forbidden in the Bible. "It's a very real thing to a lot of people and it's growing," said the Rev.

Re the planned expansion of Our Lady Queen of Angels School and Church in Newport Beach: This neighborhood is already saturated with auto traffic from the schools, churches and residential density. Students at Our Lady Queen of Angels School are dropped off and picked up, resulting in hundreds of individual daily trips into the neighborhood. Corona del Mar High School has a student population of 1,791. Staff and students drive cars in and out of the neighborhood daily, adding to the congestion.

The Rev. Fred Price, pastor of the predominantly black Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, has severed long-standing ties to a leading white Pentecostal ministry in Oklahoma over the issue of interracial dating and marriage. During a series of sermons on racism that were broadcast last winter on his nationally syndicated TV program, Price played excerpts from a taped sermon by a minister who said that young white Christians should not date people of other races.

The Reformed Church in America has launched a program that calls for creation of 98 new congregations by 1998. The program, called "98 by 98," was adopted at the 200,000-member denomination's 1990 General Synod, which just met.

January 21, 1990 | RUSSELL CHANDLER and JOHN DART, TIMES RELIGION WRITERS

Twenty years ago, the Simi Valley families of Pastor Lyle Miller and Dale and Betty Johnson were close. They camped and spent vacations together, and by 1973, Miller had started young Jeff Johnson toward confirmation at Our Savior's Lutheran Church. But as much as it personally pains him because of past ties, Miller--now a bishop presiding over Lutheran churches in Northern California--is refusing to ordain seminary graduate Jeff Johnson, 27, to the ministry.

A drifter diagnosed as a schizophrenic has been indicted in 20 church fires in Florida and Tennessee, a prosecutor said Thursday. U.S. Atty. Ken Sukhia would not discuss a motive or what evidence linked Patrick Lee Frank, 41, to the fires. Many small Florida churches had hired guards or installed alarms amid a rash of 50 unsolved fires, which began in April, 1990, and ceased after Frank's Nov. 13 arrest in Ocala on unrelated trespassing, loitering and prowling charges.

For hundreds of thousands of disabled Southern Californians, going to church is not as simple as darting across the parking lot, sliding into a pew and opening their ears and hearts to the word of God. They need wheelchair ramps, handicapped parking spaces, sign-language interpreters or simple messages, depending on their disability.

A Christian research organization that tracks trends in religious giving says the institutional church in America might be dead within 200 years, but some prominent religious researchers say reports of the church's demise are greatly exaggerated. A report from empty tomb inc., of Champaign, Ill., falls short of flatly predicting the end of local congregations and denominational bureaucracies. But it warns that church giving patterns point in that direction.

The Rev. Dick Haddon had faced difficult moral issues before, but never over hiring a janitor. He was finding this simple act of employment so difficult, in fact, that he put it off for weeks, sweeping out the Gardena First United Methodist Church himself. His dilemma was this: If he hired the best person for the job, most likely he would violate the law; if he obeyed the law, he would violate his own conscience.